[Sigia-l] Defusing Techies?

[Listera]

"Andrew McNaughton" wrote:

> I tend to find myself coming from the technical side of this communication
> issue.  People talking to me often find themselves getting a lot more
> technical detail than they want from me precisely because (ie when) there
> is an important point that needs to be gotten across.  There are better
> and worse ways to explain things, and a lot of room for judgement in what
> gets said, but sometimes its just not easy stuff to take in and has to be
> said anyway.

Well put. Sometimes the non-tech people want a "precise" answer where it's
difficult to provide, such as "Can this be technically done? Yes or No?"
They then don't want to face the corollary issues such as, Are there enough
resources to pull it off? Can it be maintained? Do we have a team to support
it? Do you want redundancy? How fast and how far does it have to grow? etc.
If you happen to ask similar questions such as potential market penetration
or ROI, where precise answers are difficult to provide, you'd either get
similar "it depends" sort of answers or, worse, a lot of marketing
buzzwords, hype, "research", projections, etc. Engineers often don't want to
engage in the latter (until they get stock options :-) so expectations from
others seem out of place.

Best,

Ziya